Tom Skinner

What if your kids thought playing with words and ideas was incredibly fun?

‘My son and I enjoyed it more than once at bed time. ’

Kids and teens love ideas from left field, a play on words that makes them giggle and stretches their creative language skills.

Call it what you will this quick ‘n’ quirky combination of poetry, youthful humor, silly phrases, puns and sketches is designed to challenge developing brains to look at language – and life – from a whole new perspective.

Tractor Gate continues Tom Skinner’s tradition of having fun with language. It contains playful musings and comments about wood, voices, rain, countries, stamina and farm equipment.

Encourage the young readers in your life to let loose with mad word associations, silly syllables and gormless giggles…in the bean bag with you, the car, or anywhere at all.

As a parent or teacher, you have probably already had some fun together with word association, punning, and experimentation via various forms of literature.

Eight short and punchy illustrated one page stories with real pulling power for perspicacious readers (ages 8-15).

Buy Tractor Gate to have some unexpected fun with verse today!

Note: Tractor Gate is the sixth book in the Get Your Wordsworth series. The other books, which can be read in any order are…Einstein’s Cat… Pavlov’s Dog… It’s Slapstick… Plain Crazy… Too Much TV… Overload

Books 1-6 are also available as a box set (Get Your Wordsworth, Volume 1).

So, what makes the Get Your Wordsworth series special? 

It's a mix of things, really. When I set out to write these books, I wanted to create a new type of poetry. A poetry-prose hybrid that was much less rigid, formal, turgid and technical than the traditional model and one that did not bore the buttocks off bright young people.

Hence the highly unorthodox format, combining a newspaper style title and sub-title, an original hand-drawn high quality sketch for each poem plus a personal author insight or pun were all designed to make the poetry more accessible and digestible for middle grade readers.

The out-of-the-box format is a direct spin off of my studies in journalism, advertising and my career as a traditionally published children's picture book author plus an innate sense of silly!

Overall, the Get Your Wordsworth series is designed for those, young and old alike, who appreciate the English language in all its nuanced, layered and textured glory and who can handle a judicious mix of the super silly and gently philosophical all imbued with a healthy dose of wry and dry humor!

What words would you, as a modern muse, use to describe this series? 

It’s very very hard to describe until you experience it for yourself because Get Your Wordsworth seems (to me at least) to be a new style of fiction…one that combines short story illustrated poems with a few modern day twists and tweaks to make verse less fearsome and impenetrable.

Overall, I call this potentially new style of pictorial poetry-prose fast blasts. But a quick brainstorm also unearthed the following possible descriptors!

casual poetry-prose

quirky poetry-prose fusion

laugh now, think later verse

micro poetry-prose

illustrated micro fiction

poetry-prose mash-up

rap traps

genre-busting poetry-prose

one minute super shorts

bite-size bedtime reads

playful poetry

cheeky poetry chunks

poetry-prose hybrid

little book of laughs

Re-verse High-brow

Pink Hippo Press

Get Your Wordsworth

Tractor Gate: easy read, short blast, funny punny poetry

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